Evaluating Credibility on the Web With Annotation, New Funding For the Credibility Coalition (CredCo)

The Credibility Coalition (CredCo), a collaboration including Hypothesis, just received significant new funding to support its work on a standardized framework anyone can use to generate and evaluate indicators about the credibility of online content like news.

CredCo’s new funding comes from major donors that seek to address the quality of information online, including Google News Lab, the Facebook Journalism Project, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and others.

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The framework harnesses annotation to link credibility indicators to specific pieces of online content — not only to entire documents or pages, but even to paragraphs, sentences, or fragments. Annotation is used throughout: in the process of creating credibility indicators, to display results directly to readers, and to publish discoverable, structured credibility data for wider use. Ultimately, readers could interact with content using tools that harness credibility data from sources they trust, like specific news sources, fact-checking services, or communities of experts.

The Credibility Coalition (CredCo) today [March 20, 2018] announces it has received generous grants from Google News Lab, the Facebook Journalism Project, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and additional private donors to expand its work to develop indicators of content credibility on the web and develop training data with these indicators based on real-world news articles.

The grants build on a $50,000 Knight Prototype Fund grant received in 2017 and mark a significant increase in resources to support the Coalition’s efforts to develop a nuanced framework of online content credibility. In particular, the new support will support frameworks and processes for assessing the credibility of analyzed articles. Data generated from these efforts will then be made available to researchers, the public, and major content platforms.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.